Piranha: Firing Point

A software interlock clicked in at the low-low fuel tank level. The gas turbine’s combustion chambers flickered off as the fuel went dry. Before the slowing turbine could drain the coil, changing from a generator to a motor, the software interlock took the turbine out of the circuit, and the torpedo plowed on with only the superconducting coil spinning the AC motor-driven shaft. But the coil had already been running low, which had brought on the gas turbine, and now with the electricity voltage dropping, the torpedo knew it was seconds from shutting down.

In tactical attacks, the weapon programming instructed it to self-destruct rather than just sink. The odds were that a close torpedo detonating could inflict as much damage as a direct hit, especially when the torpedo was a plasma weapon.

With only ten seconds of onboard power left, the low explosives forward and aft of the warhead detonated, starting the complex chain leading to plasma ignition, and within milliseconds the torpedo ceased to exist, a high-energy plasma taking its place.

There was no target ship in the vicinity to vaporize, just endless depths of ocean water. The target was distant at that point, some 2.2 kilometers away, but close enough that the explosion force would likely still sink it.

The shock wave traveled through the sea at sonic velocity, taking only a second and a fraction to reach the hull of what was, for a brief moment, still a submarine.

When the violence of the Nagasaki plasma detonation was over, the ship no longer met the definition of a ship, a vessel that kept water out and people in for a sea voyage, for the water had come in to join the people.

Dante didn’t know dick about the inferno, thought Captain Jonathon George S. Patton IV.

While he had been contemplating the universe at the plot table not ten seconds ago, things had comparatively been fine. But in the next second the fabric of his entire world had been ripped apart.

One moment he was surrounded by his nuclear submarine, steaming at emergency flank, deep, almost at test depth, following orders to clear datum, to get the hell out of the East China Sea and rendezvous at the Point Bravo Hold Position.

Except that now the Annapolis would never make it to Point Bravo.

From what Patton could understand, an explosion had happened aft in the engine room. He still couldn’t tell if the problem had been caused by the nuclear reactor or came from outside, from a torpedo or depth charge.

Both reactor-plant troubles were equally nasty — the reactor going supercritical and exploding in a blast of steam and radioactivity was not a pretty sight, nor was a double-ended shear of a twenty-four-inch steam header, blasting high-energy steam into the compartment so fast that the crew would be roasted lobsters in less than thirty seconds. And if a torpedo or depth charge had hit them, who knew if the ship could survive?

It was as if he had been suddenly awakened, like the time when a senior in high school when he had been struck broadside by a driver speeding through a red light. One moment he’d been behind the wheel, not a care in the world. The next, after the loud, resounding bang, passed in a whirlwind of impressions: being tossed across the seat, fighting a spinning steering wheel, tires shrieking, engine racing, until he had hit a tree, the horn sounding, engine dead, the silence until the siren sounded far in the distance. This was an identical feeling, down to the banging noise, the tremendous energy of the explosion deafening him, throwing him into a bulkhead aft of the starboard periscope, the deck careening sideways.

He felt his feet swept out from under him. On pure instinct he screamed, “Emergency blow both groups!

Blow!” He smashed into the deck on his chest, his arm folded under him, breaking his fall but bruising his forearm.

The world spun around him, black at the very edges, the blackness growing until Patton saw the world through a tunnel of light that grew dimmer every second.

He blinked, struggling to hold on to consciousness. He vaguely heard a clunking noise and a grunt, then a tremendous roar surrounding him, a white fog enveloping him. For a split second he thought he was floating in clouds, but then realized with gratefulness that the fog was the condensation boiling off the ice-cold high-pressure air piping behind the ballast-control panel. The ultrahigh-pressure air banks would pressurize the ballast tanks — if they still existed — to try to drive out the water and give them buoyancy to get to the surface.

“We going up?” he asked to no one in particular.

When there was no answer, just the tremendous roar continuing, he shouted it. “Hey! Chief! OOD! Anybody — we going up?” He struggled to get to his feet, but the room was crazy, fog everywhere, the surface beneath him hard and solid, but was it a deck, a bulkhead?